


MSDS Not Optional

by Merkwerkee



Category: Void Jumpers
Genre: lab accident, this is why you wear goggles kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:28:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27373474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: Baxter receives a shipment of chemicals to his lab and uses some of them during an experiment. The consequences are...explosive.
Kudos: 1





	MSDS Not Optional

Baxter Brautigan woke with a start.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, which honestly wasn’t that unusual. When he got an idea he simply _had_ to pursue it to its logical conclusion and sometimes that precluded a set sleep schedule; he’d work until he fell asleep at his desk, then wake up a few hours later and continue working. His knee always complained when he did that, but some light stretching was usually sufficient to bring the pain down to manageable levels so that was fine. Some of his best prototypes had come out of extended engineering sessions like that, and it was always exciting to see something working.

This particular wake-up call was kind of unusual in that Baxter was lying mostly prone for once; normally when he fell asleep, he did so slumped over his desk. He was still in his laboratory, however, with its somewhat speckled ceiling beaming down at him, and had apparently had to foresight to dim the lights before he conked out - which was also unusual but very welcome in this instance as even the diminished lights exacerbated his headache. That, and the timer that was going off somewhere - about 1700 Hz, not one of his usual alarms but definitely not one of the alarming alarms that meant something was on fire or anything serious like that.

Baxter let out a gusty sigh that he felt more than heard - _damn_ , that timer was louder than he thought - and began the arduous process of sitting up. Arduous, because he seemed to be in\under some of the boxes he’d left sitting in the back of his lab after unpacking the latest exotic chemicals shipment from the Company. He’d gotten a special grant to buy sulfur hexafluoride and diatomeceous silicate gel to enhance his current experiments in stabilizing magical energies in a definitive crystallite form, and he hadn’t quite gotten around to cleaning up after he’d finished taking inventory and storing those and the other assorted chemicals he’d gotten against future need. For some reason, he seemed to have chosen said boxes as the place to rest his head and while there were probably worse places to sleep in the lab, that didn’t stop a sharp cardboard corner from poking him in the kidneys.

And the timer was still going off, which was…concerning. Especially since he seemed to be waking to atypical resting circumstances. It was just so hard to _think_ ; it felt like his brains were trying to leak slowly from his ears. Still, a niggling suspicion began to worm its way into his conscious mind as he struggled to get upright in the sea of cardboard cubes. If he hadn’t chosen this place to sleep, then -

His lab was on fire.

“Oh, _Void_.”

Baxter blinked at the dancing orange flames stupidly for a moment before lunging for the first extinguisher on the nearby wall. His desk was a shambles, with blackened pieces of metal strewn all over - and in some cases, embedded in - the surface and char marks reaching to the ceiling. The lights weren’t dimmed so much as half of them were destroyed, hanging limply from the ceiling by frayed cables or staring up like empty, accusatory eyes from the floor where they’d fallen. His note-taking tablets were, for the most part, intact save for a crack or two, but he’d have to check them all thoroughly for data loss or hardware faults before he even considered using them again.

The lab recorder had char marks over the casing and several small pieces of metal embedded in the front, but it had been designed _specifically_ to withstand explosions in case an accident needed more thorough review later, so he’d at least be able to piece together the sequence of events leading up to whatever had happened here. He couldn’t quite remember, which was somewhere between irritating and worrying; on the one hand, he needed to record the results for the testing and append them to the correct test and on the other hand brain damage wasn’t that easy to fix.

Baxter grimaced as the ringing in his ears continued unabated. Tinnitus was a frequent side effect of concussions if he was remembering his brief skims of medical texts correctly, but that didn’t mean it was any less annoying. On the positive side, if he called his father while he still couldn’t hear anything maybe he wouldn’t have to listen to the inevitable forty five minute lecture on lab safety. Simply because he couldn’t remember what he’d been doing to cause his lab to explode didn’t mean he hadn’t taken all necessary safety precautions - just maybe not the ones that would have prevented the explosion in the first place.

Fortunately, the fire wasn’t large - there wasn’t that much in the lab that was flammable, full stop. Baxter was an engineer, not a chemist, and the only thing that’d been available to burn had been the shipping manifests that had come with the chemicals. Which, of course, had been the things that caught fire in the first place and burned for a suspiciously long time for mere paper products; he resolved to sweep the lab for toxic chemicals after his ears had stopped ringing to make sure the burning papers hadn’t given off anything unsavory. And also wear gloves when handling any more manifests from the Company in the future - anything that burned that long and that brightly had to be some kind of health hazard.

Fire out, he turned and surveyed the blackened mess spread out all over his lab. Blackened hunks of metal that gave no hint to their origins were literally everywhere, and char marks sprawled across every surface in a two-meter radius of the distinctly bowed worktable. Heaving a sigh, he turned to the inter-office call panel near the door and poked the button marked Maintenance.

“Hello? Yes?” He said, perhaps a bit louder than he needed to - he still couldn’t hear anything over the tinnitus - and waited a few seconds for a possible reply before ploughing forward. “Yes, I’m afraid there’s been an accident in 4C; if I could please have a mop cart and data recovery unit sent up, I would definitely appreciate that.”

A thought occurred to him, suddenly. “I don’t need a staff member, just the tools; I want to catalogue everything that went wrong and I can’t do that if the evidence gets tossed around higgeldy-piggeldy.” That was a good phrase, higgeldy-piggeldy. His mother had used it to describe his room if he hadn’t cleaned it recently. “Thank you for your time and have a good day.”

Without waiting for a reply - he wouldn’t be able to hear it if they gave one anyway - he switched the panel off and turned to survey his lab one more time.

“Higgeldy-piggeldy,” he said, and nodded decisively.

Time to start cleaning up.


End file.
